Nerdist » Solar Systemhttp://www.nerdist.com
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 22:37:40 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Erik Wernquist’s “Wanderers” is a Beautifully Realistic Future of Space Explorationhttp://www.nerdist.com/2014/12/erik-wernquists-wanderers-is-a-beautifully-realistic-future-of-space-exploration/
http://www.nerdist.com/2014/12/erik-wernquists-wanderers-is-a-beautifully-realistic-future-of-space-exploration/#commentsTue, 02 Dec 2014 03:30:41 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=205536If you’ve ever dreamed about what it might be like to explore the furthest reaches of the Solar System, filmmaker Erik Wernquist just brought that vision to life. His short film called Wanderers is, as Wernquist says on his website, a “vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like.” It’s breathtaking, in no small thanks to the masterful use of Carl Sagan’s reading of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot.

Seriously, this might even be better than Interstellar (turn the volume up and go full-screen, trust me):

The most striking thing about the film is that the locations it shows are all real places in the Solar System. The landscapes might belong to distant worlds, but a lot of them are familiar. A side by side comparison — shots from Wernquist on the left and images from NASA on the right — show just how brilliantly realistic his vision is.

This scene shows Ligeia Mare, the second largest known body of liquid on the second largest moon in the Solar System, Saturn’s moon Titan. Filled with liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane rather than water like an Earthly ocean, Ligeia Mare sits in Titan’s north polar region. The false color image on the right is Ligeia Mare as seen by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft between February 2006 and April 2007.

Another shot from the Saturnian system shows a series of settlements built along the Iapetus ridge, a prominent geologic feature that runs along a large portion of Saturn’s moon Iapetus’ circumference. This massive ridge wasn’t discovered until 2004 when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made a class pass by this moon on September 10. The unprocessed image shows the ridge as it is.

Still in the Saturnian system, Wernquist shows a spacecraft moving through the geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This is another feature we didn’t discover until the Cassini spacecraft made its close pass by this moon in 2005. And again, Wernquist’s image is wonderfully close to the real thing. The plumes spray water ice and vapor from multiple spots along the “tiger stripes” — the roughly 84-mile long features that cross the moon’s southern pole.

In one Maritan scene, Wernquist shows human explorers watching a blue sunset on Mars. The original image was taken on May 19, 2005, by NASA’s Spirit rover. Spirit stayed awake a little longer than normal that day (properly sol 489) to capture the Sun setting below the rim of Gusev crater using its panoramic camera. The images that were combined to make this mosaic were taken around 6:07 in the evening, giving us a stunning look at twilight on Mars.

Another Martian vista shows Cape Verde, a geologically rich outcrop that is teaching scientists about Victoria crater, a crater scientists suspect is located in the middle of what used to be an ancient sand dune field. This image taken by NASA’s Opportunity rover shows a 20-foot high cliff face of the Cape Verde promontory taken from inside Victoria Crater (The images that make up this mosaic were taken on sols 1342 and 1356, November 2 and 17, 2007.)

Perhaps the most incredible shot in Wernquist’s film is one of humans base-jumping off the tallest known cliff in the Solar System: Verona Rupes on Uranus’ moon Miranda. We don’t know a lot about this feature on Miranda because we’ve only visited Uranus once. Voyager 2 flew near to the moon on January 24, 1986, and snapped this narrow-angle image of Miranda’s highly varied surface. This image shows the moon’s ridges and valleys that were likely created by compressional tectonics; they are crossed by faults. The fault in this images might be as high as three miles, making it higher than the walls of the Grand Canyon.

That Wernquist uses real places and recognizable scenes in this short film makes the prospect of exploring our cosmic backyard feel that much more exciting and tangible. We’re halfway there with robots; every place shown in the film is somewhere we’ve been. Now we just need to follow in those robotic footsteps.

]]>http://www.nerdist.com/2014/12/erik-wernquists-wanderers-is-a-beautifully-realistic-future-of-space-exploration/feed/1This Picture of a Baby Solar System is Real and It’s Spectacularhttp://www.nerdist.com/2014/11/this-picture-of-a-baby-solar-system-is-real-and-its-spectacular/
http://www.nerdist.com/2014/11/this-picture-of-a-baby-solar-system-is-real-and-its-spectacular/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 02:30:48 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=198886What we know about Solar System formation might need a revision thanks to this latest image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The new image — and it’s an image, not a model or a simulation — shows a very nascent solar system.

The star in this instance is HL Tau, an orange dwarf star that’s only about a million years old. That’s extremely young; our Sun, by comparison, is about 4.6 billion years old. It sits about 450 light years from the Earth, and it’s surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, an accretion disk we know spins around a star and eventually coalesces into planets.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in this image. The image isn’t just a disk, it’s a series of bright, concentric rings separated by gaps. Those gaps are left by very young planets just starting to come together. Over time, gravity binds the material in the disk to form larger bodies, bodies that amass more material as their gravity increases. Eventually, they will become full planets in their own right, shaping the solar system and clearing wider and wider gaps as they orbit their parent star. We’re seeing the very first stages of that process in this image.

That we can see this process happening at all is sort of amazing. Normally a gaseous cloud like this would obscure this protoplanetary process from view, but ALMA was able to see through it. That’s because ALMA’s telescopes see in the radio to infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, waves that are shorter than the visible light we can see. Warm dust glows in theses wavelengths, which means ALMA can look through the obscuring dust to bring us this stunning view of a solar system being born.

A composite image of the young star HL Tauri and its surroundings using data from ALMA (enlarged in box at upper right) and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (rest of the picture). This is the first ALMA image where the image sharpness exceeds that normally attained with Hubble. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/NASA/ESA

The image is the clearest one to date showing a solar system’s formation, and offers the best evidence that our theories about solar system formation are right. But it’s especially interesting because HL Tau is so young. Thanks to this image, astronomers can conclude that the process of planetary formation occurs much faster than previously thought.

But even if you’re not into all the incredible science in this baby photo, you can’t deny that something being born is a pretty amazing sight.

]]>http://www.nerdist.com/2014/11/this-picture-of-a-baby-solar-system-is-real-and-its-spectacular/feed/7This Moon Isn’t A Death Star, But It Might Have An Oceanhttp://www.nerdist.com/2014/10/this-moon-isnt-a-death-star-but-it-might-have-an-ocean/
http://www.nerdist.com/2014/10/this-moon-isnt-a-death-star-but-it-might-have-an-ocean/#commentsFri, 17 Oct 2014 23:30:19 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=192804When it comes to Saturn’s moons, Titan gets most of the extraterrestrial love. But there are plenty of other interesting little bodies orbiting the ringed planet. Take Mimas, the little moon that looks suspiciously like the Death Star. And adding to the intrigue, scientists suspect the moon might harbor a subsurface ocean of liquid water.

The tip off to the possible ocean is Mimas’ rhythmic wobble. A team of scientists led by Radwan Tajeddine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, noticed in analyzing pictures from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft that the moon, which orbits around Saturn every 23 hours, wobbles around its axis.

This isn’t uncommon for a moon. Most moons, including our own, wobble just a little as they orbit. What was surprising was how much Mimas wobbles. The moon is small, just 250 miles in diameter. A moon that size is expected to wobble by less than 2 miles. Mimas’ wobble is twice that.

The scientists used computer simulations to try and figure out what could be making Mimas wobble so dramatically. One possibility pointed to the Herschel impact crater, the one that gives the moon to look of a fully operational battle station. Scientist played with the idea that remnants of an asteroid are buried under the crater, offsetting the moon’s center of gravity. But that doesn’t work. If that were the case, Mimas would have settled into a different orbit, likely with the crater pointing permanently towards Saturn.

Another idea was that Mimas has an oblong rocky core, making the moon slightly football-shaped and wobbly without affecting its orientation relative to Saturn.

A subsurface ocean could have the same perceived orbital effects as a football-shaped moon, especially if it’s lying between a spherical core and a shell of ice. A partially fluid core sloshing around inside the moon could account for Mimas’ irregular spin around its axis.

For the time being, the existence of Mimas’ subsurface ocean remains in the world of conjecture. But it’s not impossible. Planetary scientists have gathered significant evidence that Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, as well as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, all have subsurface oceans. Finding that Mimas should be on that list wouldn’t be that fantastical.

It would also give us a compelling reason to visit the moon; liquid water beneath the surface could harbor life. Maybe. And besides, the moon only looks like a Death Star.

]]>http://www.nerdist.com/2014/10/this-moon-isnt-a-death-star-but-it-might-have-an-ocean/feed/0Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot is Getting Less Gianthttp://www.nerdist.com/2014/05/jupiters-giant-red-spot-is-getting-less-giant/
http://www.nerdist.com/2014/05/jupiters-giant-red-spot-is-getting-less-giant/#commentsSat, 17 May 2014 02:00:51 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=148848The oldest and largest storm in our solar system may be finally winding down.

New photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the anticyclonic storm you my know as the Great Red Spot (GRS) is smaller than it has ever been. Researchers remain puzzled over what is causing the famously furious storm to calm down a bit.

“Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the Great Red Spot (GRS) is now approximately 10,250 miles across, the smallest diameter we’ve ever measured,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in a press release.

The first confirmed viewings of the GRS date back to the 1800s. These early observations put the spot at roughly 25,500 miles across at its widest diameter. In 1979 when Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter, we were able to size the spot at 14,500 miles across. In 1995, Hubble measured the diameter as 13,020 miles across, and by 2009 it was at 11,130 miles. The storm is getting smaller but it is still huge. To give you a sense of how much bigger this storm is than Earth, our own diameter is a puny 7,917.6 miles.

By 2012, as more and more observational ability fell in the hands of amateur observers here on Earth, scientists became aware of an apparent increase in the spot’s actual rate of ‘shrinkage’ (Costanza, 1994). The reason behind the shrinkage, and why it’s happening faster and faster, remains a mystery to scientists.

One detail scientists have noticed are the small eddies that have appeared along the edges of the GRS. “In our new observations it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm,” said Simon. “We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the accelerated change by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot.” Simon and her team plan to take a harder look at these eddies in the future to see if they are related to the spot’s changing size.

]]>http://www.nerdist.com/2014/05/jupiters-giant-red-spot-is-getting-less-giant/feed/5Wear the Entire Solar System on Your Wrist For Just $245,000http://www.nerdist.com/2014/01/wear-the-entire-solar-system-on-your-wrist-for-just-245000/
http://www.nerdist.com/2014/01/wear-the-entire-solar-system-on-your-wrist-for-just-245000/#commentsWed, 29 Jan 2014 17:30:08 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=109321Yes, you read that headline right: French jewelry company Van Cleef and Arpels‘ latest offering, the Complication Poétique Midnight Planétarium, will run you a cool $245,000, but in exchange you get a watch with 396 moving pieces that shows all of our solar system’s visible planets moving around the watch’s face in real time. Did we mention that it accurately features the rotation of the Earth and five other visible planets — Mercury in 88 days, Venus in 224 days, Earth in 365 days, Mars in 687 days, Jupiter in 12 years, and Saturn in 29 years? Because it totally does. As if that wasn’t enough, a shooting star that rotates around the outermost area of the face will tell you the time. Your move, Timex.

Speaking with Cool Hunting, Van Cleef master watchmaker Denis Giguet explained the difficulty of constructing the watch: “The complication is not only to make orbits for the planets, the biggest or the most complicated is to make it with this type of case—it’s very thin.” Comprised of two separate parts, an internal movement mechanism designed in-house and a custom-made module designed by boutique designer Christiaan van der Klaauw, who specializes in astronomy-related design, the automatic winding mechanism itself is a thing of beauty.

You may be saying to yourself, “Gee, that seems like an awful lot to pay for a watch. Are the planets all tiny precious and semi-precious gemstones?” Yes, dear reader, yes they are, and there’s a black alligator leather strap to boot. There’s an even more expensive version, too, with baguette-cut diamonds set into the bezel, whatever the hell that means. Now, go ahead and drool over these gorgeous images of the watch and start brainstorming how you’re going to raise the scratch to put this bad boy on your wrist.